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Why Isn't Servant Leadership More Prevalent?

With servant leadership, a leader’s primary role is to serve employees. Everyone from Lao-Tzu to Max De Pree thinks this a wonderful model. Why, then, is this style so rare among CEOs? HBS Professor James Heskett ponders the topic in this column, which first appeared on the HBS Working Knowledge website.

BY JAMES HESKETT

Servant leadership is an age-old concept, a term loosely used to suggest that a leader’s primary role is to serve others, especially employees. I witnessed a practical example of it at a ServiceMasterServiceMaster board meeting in the 1990s when CEO William Pollard spilled a cup of coffee prior to the board meeting.

Instead of summoning someone to clean it up, he asked a colleague to get him cleaning compound and a cloth, things easily found in a company that provided cleaning services. Whereupon he proceeded to get down on his hands and knees to clean up the spill himself. The remarkable thing was that board members and employees alike hardly noticed as he did it. It was as if it was expected in a company with self-proclaimed servant leadership.

Lao-Tzu wrote about servant leadership in the fifth-century BC: “The highest type of ruler is one of whose existence the people are barely aware…. The Sage is self-effacing and scanty of words. When his task is accomplished and things have been completed, all the people say, ‘We ourselves have achieved it!’”

It is natural, rightly or wrongly, to relate servant leadership to the concept of an inverted pyramid organization in which top management “reports” upward to lower levels of management. At other times it has been associated with organizations that have near-theological values (for example, Max De Pree’s leadership at Herman Miller, as expressed in his book, Leadership is an Art, that emphasizes the importance of love, elegance, caring, and inclusivity as central elements of management). In that regard, it is also akin to the pope’s annual washing and kissing of the feet as part of the Holy Thursday rite.

The modern era of servant leadership began with a paper, The Servant as Leader, written by Robert Greenleaf in 1970. In it, he said: “The servant leader is servant first … It begins with the natural feeling that one wants to serve, to serve first. Then conscious choice brings one to aspire to lead … (vs. one who is leader first…) … The best test, and difficult to administer, is: Do those served grow as persons … (and become) more likely themselves to become servants?”

Now it appears that a group of organizational psychologists, led by Adam Grant, are attempting to measure the impact of servant leadership on leaders, not just those being led. Grant describes research in his recent book, Give and Take, that suggests that servant leaders are not only more highly regarded than others by their employees and not only feel better about themselves at the end of the day but are more productive as well. His thesis is that servant leaders are the beneficiaries of important contacts, information, and insights that make them more effective and productive in what they do even though they spend a great deal of their time sharing what they learn and helping others through such things as career counseling, suggesting contacts, and recommending new ways of doing things.

Further, servant leaders don’t waste much time deciding to whom to give and in what order. They give to everyone in their organizations. Grant concludes that giving can be exhausting but also self-replenishing. So in his seemingly tireless efforts to give, described in the book, Grant makes it a practice to give to everyone until he detects a habitual “taker” that can be eliminated from his “gift list.”

Servant leadership is only one approach to leading, and it isn’t for everyone. But if servant leadership is as effective as portrayed in recent research, why isn’t it more prevalent? What do you think?

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The problem with servant leadership is that it requires humility, confidence, and trust on the part of the leader. Leaders who know themselves, are comfortable with themselves, and who understand their own strengths, and especially weaknesses become good servant leaders. Leaders who don’t have that self-awareness will never reach that level.

From a slightly different view, it’s interesting how many leaders fail to completely grasp the reality that those workers they serve have that leader’s future in their hands.

Excellent post. Could it be that ‘servant leadership’ is actually becoming not merely one leadership approach, but THE leadership approach in the 21st century, digital, information age? I would argue that it is.

The author states that a leader’s primary role is to serve employees in servant leadership. True… but perhaps incomplete…

Leaders–servant leaders– extend their influence by reaching ever greater numbers of individuals at ever deeper levels. Day to day that will be seen in a laser focus on serving their employees. It is through employees that the leader can have the greatest effect generally.

Nonetheless it should not be lost that one is fundamentally seeking to serve those outside the enterprise, and the leadership role includes the need to continuously monitor and extend the greater value creation in reaching many stakeholders.

The example of the CEO cleaning up his own coffee spill is a very visible example showing how he personally cares for the appearance and maintenance of the company’s space and how he doesn’t just leave it or bark at someone else to get it cleaned up. However, I’m putting out the idea that servant leadership isn’t necessarily so “mild”. For example, perhaps grooming a successor the CEO might realize her chosen candidate has a tendency to be a little to fickle or emotionally fragile or maybe even too proud, maybe the CEO acting like a servant in role might rightly see being a stern order giver as what her successor needs. Thoughts?

I think that part of the difficulty many cultures may have is a focus on what is “success” and what is not. For example, in posting this response, my computer is receiving a message that tells me the “Top 35 Quotes Every Entrepreneur Should Live By.” That message is designed to motivate me to adopt them with an aim to being successful as an Entrepreneur. Real servant leaders will read them with interest, but they already know that these quotes will not help define their successes in business. It is their team members that will do that.

We have all seen graduates of good schools go on and assume very responsible roles in business and most of the times these folks are driven to success – whatever their definition of success is. But their approaches were moulded during their formal education. When I graduated from university with a bachelor of Civil Engineering, I had been taught that the numbers were the solution. And the people? They were the problem. It took a long time to overcome that impediment to good leadership. Praise goes to the senior non-commissioned officers of the Canadian Signal Corps who corrected that misperception.

When MBA programs (the primary formal educational institutions of our young aspiring business leaders) implement the concepts of servant leadership in their curricula (with as much emphasis on it as on effective business measurement tools) that will be the start of a more widespread acceptance of the tenets of servant leadership in corporate cultures. Until then, servant leadership will not be the mainstream approach.

I’m afraid the attributes typically associated with leaders do not line up with the attributes of a servant leader. In most companies, in order to rise up the ranks to senior leadership positions, it takes a lot of horn trumpeting and self promotion. Our society has become very self-focused. Look at Twitter, Facebook, and other social media. It is all about me and what I’m doing. The selfless nature required to be a servant leader is not typically rewarded in our society. Servant leader attributes certainly aren’t broadly accepted as sought after traits for leadership roles, otherwise we would have many more servant leaders.

Great article! Fortunately, I have been blessed with a company that really does exemplify servant leadership. Furthermore, I volunteer for a non profit Christian organization – Kansas City Tres Dias – that promotes servant leadership and the training of such persons. It has been great witnessing the businessmen that come in as leaders and leave as servants. I love hearing the remarks from men and women that come on the weekend expecting to go back and change others when they really find themselves changed.

Very interesting is eco-empathic conception of management. In this conception two crucial factors are combined – empathy and ecology. In practice of management the idea of the corporate sustainability is applied. It embraces both “hard” action – technical, as well as “soft” one – social. It gives a concrete form to “the triple bottom line” of management, which seeks for such solutions to economic problems which are at the same time: economically valuable, ecologically friendly and socially responsible [Bronislaw Bombala, Phenomenology of the Management as the Eco-Empathic Leadership, in. Phenomenology and the Human Positioning in the Cosmos: The Life-world, Nature, Earth: Book Two (Analecta Husserliana CXIV), ed. Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, Springer, Dordrecht 2013, pp. 203-218].

Servant leadership does not exist only in management. It can and should be part of the organizational culture at all levels and should be a qualifier in the selection of any job candidate. Take for example the person that is cleaning the offices and goes to empty their basket outside and notices first that its about to rain and second that the windows are down on one of the company vehicles. The janitorial person goes to the car and rolls up the windows. Its not their job, but the action serves the organization.

Hello! Bronislaw. I have 2 updates to my post. One applies to the Greece’s debate, which I suggest to be reframed into a generative dialogue of Eurozone interdependence. The other applies to the need for Freedom of Expression to go to a new world social order, instead of the 2nd Middle Ages terror of yesterday in Fance.

Servant Leadership can be implemented across the vast spectrum of industries and in all economic sectors as a foundation to the practices and culture of participative decision-making which will improve an organization’s overall return on investment in staff. Managers, supervisors and leaders in positions of trust who share power, empower and respect their staff; enable their people to perform and develop to their maximum potential; and that put the needs of others first, regardless of their organizational hierarchy; obtain the best employee performance and have the lowest attrition.

Confusion in the modern world about what a ‘servant’ actually is and does. People tend to think of ‘waiter’ or something, whereas the master-servant relationship is much richer and more dynamic than that. Servant-leadership seems to have more impact where there is a sophisticated idea of service, like church organisations.

The paradox of if the leader is servant, then the organisation must be ‘master’. It seems an odd relationship (though I have no doubt that Greenleaf intended this as a thought-provoker).

The metaphor of servant-leadership doesn’t appeal to those who have been traditionally cast in servant roles – women, ethnic minorities. They are fed up with this position and may be seeking something different.